If you missed the Lego towers and Andy Warhol wigs in Douglas Coupland’s exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery last summer, don’t worry. You can now virtually travel the exhibition online.

The Vancouver Art Gallery has launched its first Google Art Project with Coupland’s exhibition, everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything.

What this means is that by using your Internet browser, you can look at all 74 artworks. The images are all high definition so you can zoom in to see detail. As well, you can take your own customized digital walking tour with Google Street View.

An estimated 80,000 people saw the exhibition at the VAG in 2014. But now that the exhibition is part of the Google Art Project, it has the potential to be seen by many more thousands of people around the world.

Daina Augaitis, the gallery’s chief curator and associate director, said making digital versions of Coupland’s works and putting them online opens up new possibilities for the exhibition.

“I think it is very exciting for us — we feel like we’re in the 21st century,” she said. “Doug is the one who is very invested in technology, he always wants to be engaged with it.”

Augaitis spoke by phone from Toronto where she is at the opening of Coupland’s exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Augaitis said the VAG, with the help of a friend of Coupland’s in Toronto, approached Google to ask the company about both sponsoring the exhibition and including it as part of Street View. Once approved, the Street View camera spent two days recording the exhibition after-hours.

Since the VAG was already taking high definition photographs for the catalogue, they only had to be reformatted for a different platform.

By December, the VAG had the data back from Google so it could add titles and text, such as quotes from Coupland and interpretative material. The site went live Wednesday morning.

Augaitis said an online tour of an exhibition is different than seeing it in person.

“We had our first preview of Doug’s exhibition last night and someone said: ‘I have a brother in Vancouver. He can’t believe he missed the show at the VAG.’ Here’s a chance to experience it in some dimension,” Augaitis said.

“As museums, we have to be thinking of the viewer before, during, and after the visit and how to keep them engaged.”

The Google Art Project started in February, 2011. It’s an online platform of high resolution images of art works held by more than 500 museums and cultural institutions around the world. It’s part of Google’s Cultural Institute.

Amit Sood, head of the Cultural Institute, said Google jumped at the opportunity to put Coupland’s exhibition online.

“To be frank with you, it is very humbling that Douglas agreed to do it for us,” Sood said from London.

“He is quite an interesting individual. He has worked in so many different mediums, he’s so world-renowned. I think he’s one of the most impactful people around.”

Sood said the Cultural Institute works with museums or galleries rather than individual artists.

“We really rely on (museums) to tell us what exhibitions they think should come online,” he said. “We don’t really play a curatorial role at all.”

Sood said during the past four years, the Google Art Project has started to see people spend more time looking at works online.

“When you’re in a gallery in front of an art work, you look at it and walk by,” he said.

“We have started seeing upwards of 30 seconds on single art works. On exhibitions, the numbers are even higher. Unfortunately, I can’t go into details. All I can tell you is that we will release the numbers very soon.”

There is no advertising on any part of the Cultural Institute which Sood described as a non-commercial entity within Google.

Sood admitted being obsessed not only with volume and quantity of viewers but with engagement as well.

“If a hundred people really understand your work as an artist, sometimes for an artist and cultural institution that is more relevant than a 1,000 people who walk by and don’t remember the work,” he said.